Famously dubbed “the Chekhov of the suburbs” by Elmore Leonard, the great American writer of western and crime novels, John Cheever remains an undisputed master of the craft of short story writing. Of all the different short story collections I have yet encountered on this chronological journey through the Pulitzer Prize-winners, The Stories of John Cheever strikes me as one of the best (if not, the best short story collection among the winners). In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979, this collection was a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner (and then the latter-released paperback edition also won the National Book Award 1981 after the National Book Award divided out its awards between separate hardcover and paperback winners, awarding one in each category from 1980-1983 before reverting back to the traditional model of one winner per year).
Philip Roth once said that John Cheever writes with “enchanted realism” and I couldn’t agree more. The sixty-one concise, sonorous, perspicacious short stories gathered in this collection continue to reflect the attitude of a keen social observer, and they each seem to unearth an otherworldly space wherein the human condition is examined through a dissection of the veneer of upper middle-class complacency. Amidst an endless sea of martinis and vacation homes and cooks and gardeners, Cheever presents an otherwise drab, commonplace world and makes it comes alive. His tales typically center on upper middle-class WASP suburbanite families residing in towns like Westchester, New York, or in Nantucket, or in the fictional community of Shady Hill (which reappears in a handful of stories, much like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County). But whenever abroad, Cheever’s stories always seem to take place in Italy. His protagonists tend to be men who are struggling to find happiness and satisfaction in life. Often, they are middle-aged alcoholics trapped in loveless marriages, filled with neighborly envy, burning with a sense of envy, ennui, and disillusionment, as they attend parties, drink excessively, and seemingly stare down their own oblivion. In spite of dealing with a somewhat somber subject matter, Cheever’s stories are never boring. They are colorful, shocking, spiritual, and even surrealist in nature.
While every short story in this collection is worthwhile, the general critical consensus seems to praise five of the stories in particular: “Goodbye, My Brother,” “The Country Husband,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Five Forty-Eight,” and “The Swimmer” –the latter of which is often regarded as Cheever’s single greatest achievement, and even praised as the best short story ever written. Below, I have included some brief reflections on a batch of the stories:
“Goodbye, My Brother”
In “Goodbye, My Brother” we are introduced to a questionably reliable narrator who describes his close-knit family “in spirit” (the Pommeroys), consisting of four adult children and their mother, although their father died in a sailing accident. For a family reunion, they gather at the Laud’s Head family summer home on the islands of Massachusetts, but many in the family are apprehensive because the youngest brother, Lawrence, will be appearing for the first time in many years. Lawrence (also known as “Tifty” for the way his slippers sounded on the floor as a child) is an antagonistic, negative presence in the family. Amidst all the drinking of martinis, swimming, games of backgammon, and tennis, he is sickened by the pageantry of it all. Eventually, the narrator confronts and fights with his gloomy brother Lawrence and leaves him bleeding on a beach, which leads to Lawrence’s abrupt departure.
The central subject for inquiry in the story is Lawrence’s dismal attitude toward his family. Why is he so disagreeable? What is the cause of his familial antipathy? He claims to have arrived only to say goodbye. In fact, he has been saying goodbye to a great many people and places in his life. But was there ever really a brother at all? Or does Lawrence simply represent that lingering animus which resides in large families? Perhaps Lawrence is merely just a piece of the narrator’s own thoughts, a reflection of his inner jadedness. Indeed, when an early commenter found the narrative of this story “troublingly uncertain,” Cheever’s response was “There was no brother; there was no Lawrence.”
“Goodbye, My Brother” ends on a puzzling note as the narrator watches his wife and sister emerge naked from the ocean, like nymphs from the pages of classical mythology (in fact, mythological motifs can be found throughout Cheever’s stories).
“The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming –Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea” (21).
“The Country Husband”
“The Country Husband” begins as businessman Francis Weed suddenly experiences a plane crash in a cornfield outside Philadelphia but when he finally returns home to the miserable “battlefield” that is his family with four children, nobody really seems to pay much attention to the traumatizing plane crash he has experienced –Did the crash ever really happen? Or was it merely intended to be a metaphor for Francis’s daily struggles at work and home? At any rate, the Weeds then attend a neighborhood party filled with copious drinking (in which Francis shockingly recognizes the maid at the party as a woman who previously underwent a public shaming ritual during the war for sleeping with the occupying Germans, but Francis chooses to keep this a secret). Later, he drives a young teenage girl named Anne Murchison home after she was babysitting the Weeds’ children. However, when Anne starts to cry because of her father’s alcoholism, it opens Francis’s eyes. Suddenly, he sees her as a lovely, sensitive young woman in need of tenderness and embrace. This scene offers Francis some much-needed space for emotional vulnerability, something he has clearly been lacking in his ordinary life. She gives him an innocent kiss as a way of saying “thank you” before skipping up to the door of her house. But Francis quickly falls in lust with her. In fact, he can think of little else over the next several weeks.
“He had confused a lack of discrimination with Christian love, and the confusion seemed general and destructive. He was grateful to the girl for this bracing sensation of independence. Birds were singing –cardinals and the last of the robins. The sky shone like enamel. Even the smell of ink from his morning paper honed his appetite for life, and the world that was spread out around him was plainly a paradise” (334).
Here, Cheever offers all manner of allusions to Dante and Petrarch in this tale, as well as nods to the fairly silly tradition of Christian courtly love. In this way, Francis Weed and Humbert Humbert share a disturbing thread in common. When Francis finally sees young Anne again, he immediately kisses her without warning, but the two are spotted by a child who always seems to be roaming about the neighborhood:
“He did not know when he would see the girl next. He had the bracelet in his inside pocket when he got home. Opening the door of his house, he found her in the hall. Her back was to him, and she turned when she heard the door close. Her smile was open and loving. Her perfection stunned him like a fine day –a day after a thunderstorm. He seized her and covered her lips with his, and she struggled but she did not have to struggle for long, because just then little Gertrude Flannery appeared from somewhere and said, ‘Oh, Mr. Weed’” (335).
Will Francis’s secret be exposed? Will it ruin his family? How will Francis handle this highly problematic situation? In time, the Weed’s learn that their babysitter Anne Murchison is actually engaged to another young boy and Francis takes every opportunity to discount and discredit the boy –he has an outburst of rudeness toward a friendly woman on the train platform (which later costs his family an invitation to her party), and it eventually leads to a shocking confrontation with his wife Julia in which he responds by abruptly hitting her in the face. As they quarrel, Julia threatens to leave him before finally being convinced to stay.
“He had been lost once in his life, coming back from a trout stream in the north woods, and he had now the same bleak realization that no amount of cheerfulness or hopefulness or valor or perseverance could help him find, in the gathering dark, the path that he’d lost” (344).
In the end, Francis believes he has seen young Anne on the train but when he rushes to follow her, he discovers it is merely an old woman. He decides to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Herzog (perhaps a nod to Cheever’s friend Saul Bellow?) and he advises that Francis start doing woodwork (similarly, Cheever was also said to be obsessed with cutting wood with his chainsaw). As the story ends, we are given a quiet suburban scene: “it is night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains” (346). This arresting closing line echoes the words of a chummy husband featured earlier in the story at the end of a cocktail party, in which remarked that “‘She’s my blue sky [referring to his wife]. After sixteen years, I still bite her shoulders. She makes me feel like Hannibal crossing the Alps.’” There is a latent yearning among the suburban men of Shady Hill to feel like conquerors riding elephants over the Alps like Hannibal, even though “The Country Husband” might well be interpreted as a sad tale of suburban resignment to a mediocre, loveless life. Tragically, much of this tale is left unspoken, from the plane crash to the maid from the war, and even Francis’s secret need for real love. Beneath the veneer of orderly perfection, Shady Hill is a world that harbors many secrets.
Note: This was the first of the eight stories that Cheever set in the fictional suburban community of Shady Hill which frequently appears throughout his stories. It won a coveted O. Henry Award in 1956. Cheever also won a second O. Henry Award in 1964 for his short story “The Embarkment for Cythera” which does not appear in this collection.
“The Enormous Radio”
“Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester” (33).
Almost akin to an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, in “The Enormous Radio” Jim and Irene Westcott pinch their pennies and purchase a new radio ostensibly to support their love of music –“Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair” (33). However, as Irene listens to the radio all day, she quickly finds that it is mistakenly picking up the private conversations of other people living in her building. As she continues to eavesdrop, she absorbs the miserable stories and salacious gossip of her neighbors, “She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith and despair.” And she begins to grow paranoid others might be listening to her, as well. “Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we’ve never been like that, have we darling? Have we? I mean, we’ve always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven’t we? And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren’t sordid, are they, darling? Are they? She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. ‘We’re happy, aren’t we, darling? We are happy, aren’t we?’” (40).
“The Enormous Radio” examines the passivity of listening, the desire for eavesdropping and voyeurism, to judge others without being judged. As has been shown in the social media age, people cannot simply poke their heads into the lives of others and innocently observe without internalizing the problems in their own lives. The panopticon effect of technology sometimes creates a confining prison rather than an expansive horizon.
“The Five Forty-Eight”
A business executive simply identified as “Blake” leaves his office one evening to find himself followed by a mystery woman waiting in the shadows. He carefully navigates through the streets in order to avoid her. Later, she confronts him on the five forty-eight train and we learn that her name is Miss Dent. She is a shy, diffident woman who worked as Blake’s secretary (he chose her because she seemed to have low self-confidence). Blake then slept with her and then orchestrated her abrupt firing (this is apparently something Blake has done numerous times over). But now Miss Dent claims she has been sick for two weeks and hasn’t worked for three months.
As it turns out, Miss Dent is a fairly unhinged individual who has had severe mental health concerns necessitating a hospital stay in the past. She secretly confronts Blake with a pistol and forces him to read a note she wrote:
“Dear Husband… they say that human love leads us to divine love, but is this true? I dream about every night. I have such terrible desires. I have always had a gift for dreams. I dreamed on Tuesday of a volcano erupting with blood. When I was in the hospital they said they wanted to cure me but they only wanted to take away my self-respect. They only wanted me to dream about sewing and basketwork but I protected my gift for dreams. I’m clairvoyant. I can tell when the telephone is going to ring. I’ve never had a true friend in my whole life…” (244).
They step off the train together at Shady Hill and when they are alone, Miss Dent forces Blake at gunpoint to fall to his knees, sobbing as he collapses face-down into the dirt.
“Stop… Turn around. Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you. Look at your poor face. But you don’t know what I’ve been through. I’m afraid to go out in the daylight. I’m afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I’m like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself after it begins to get dark. But still and all I’m better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and the brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you…” (247).
Will she kill him? Would he deserve it? With his hands outstretched in the dirt beside the train station, Miss Dent apparently decides her revenge has been exacted.
“’Now I feel better,’ she said. ‘Now I can wash my hands of you, I can wash my hands of all this, because you see there is some kindness, some saneness in me that I can find and use. I can wash my hands’” (247). And with that she abruptly departs leaving Blake to walk home alone.
In “The Five Forty-Eight” we encounter the pitiful mediocrity of a man like “Blake” who preys on women in the workplace and tosses them aside like yesterday’s news, but who otherwise leads an awful life of marital discord and unbearable suburban ordinariness. There is something gratifying about a madwoman taking her revenge on a predator, but the terrifying veracity of “The Five Forty-Eight” is how commonplace a man like Blake truly is.
“The Swimmer”
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night’” (603).
Inspired by the Greek myth of Narcissus, middle-aged Neddy Merrill is lounging poolside at the home of his neighbors the Westerhazys in Westchester, New York when he abruptly decides to swim his way home (eight miles away), by jumping into the various backyard pools of fourteen of his fellow suburbanites along the way. He dubs this series of pools (each filled with sapphire water) the “Lucinda River” in honor of his wife.
Neddy imagines himself as a famous “explorer” or even a classical hero as he is warmly greeted by friends and well-wishers along the way: “Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny” (604). In this surrealist story, Neddy’s journey begins on a sunny afternoon amidst green lawns and well-trimmed hedges as he is handed plenty of alcoholic beverages along the way. But time passes and a storm suddenly comes through, and the seasons seem to blur together, giving the reader an unclear sense of time.
Soon the sunny optimism filled that was once with natural beauty at the start of the journey has become ensconced in dread as the weather grows cloudy, cold, and dark, and Neddy becomes exhausted, barely able to heave himself out of each subsequent pool. When he makes it to the Hallorans’ pool (where they always swim naked), the Hallorans express their sorrow to Neddy over his “misfortunes.” This confuses Neddy so he continues onward with more drinks and he crashes a party at the Biswangers where he and his wife have often been looked over for social outings. He learns of another neighbor who underwent a serious life-threatening operation several years ago, but Neddy has no recollection of it. At last, he arrives at the home of Shirley Adams, a woman with whom he once had an affair, but when he dips into her pool, she refuses to serve him a drink and she curtly dismisses him. Unamused and refusing to loan him any more money, she stands beside another man in her house. Confused and seemingly disoriented, Neddy begins to weep before he at last arrives at his home, only to find that his wife and daughters are gone. His home is entirely empty and abandoned.
Thus concludes this brilliant alcoholic Dante-esque odyssey back to the origins of Neddy’s own personal hell. Unsurprisingly, this was a rather “dark and cold” story for Cheever to pen, and it was reportedly the last story he wrote for quite some time thereafter because it troubled him so greatly. Indeed, “The Swimmer” is a haunting, deeply arresting modern mythological quest that leaves readers with an unsettling sense of wonder. I will continue ruminating upon this short story for quite some time to come.
In 1968, “The Swimmer” was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Burt Lancaster. This is the only literary work by Cheever that has appeared on screen (excluding several television shows). “The Swimmer” first appeared in the July 18, 1964, issue of The New Yorker. Cheever bemoaned the fact that the story was position toward the end of the issue –behind a story by his friend John Updike. Apparently, William Maxwell and other editors at the magazine were the surrealist story.
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There are many other short stories worthy of deep reflection in this collection, such as the sentimental “Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor” which chronicles Charlie, a poor elevator doorman at a wealthy New York residence building whose denizens take pity on Charlie and give him drinks and food and gifts for Christmas, but the resulting drunken revelry leads to Charlie’s firing. Or the cliché “O City of Broken Dreams” which follows a midwestern family of three who travel from Indiana to New York City only to be exploited and scammed at every turn. Or “The Sutton Place Story” which centers on Deborah Tennyson, a three-year-old girl, the daughter of working parents in New York City, who is regularly left in the care of Mrs. Harley who sometimes secretly leaves the lively girl with a friend in the building named Renee. One day, Deborah escapes and pays a visit to a friend she has mentioned in passing named Martha, however nobody seems to have listened to Deborah or is even aware of her friend named Martha. She is finally found by the police eating bread outside an antique store on third avenue (in my view, this story is a tragic study of parental detachment).
There is also “The Hartleys” which is about a troubled marriage that culminates in a skiing accident in which the couple’s daughter, Anne, is crushed to death by a tow motor. And “The Summer Farmer” which is about urbanite Paul Hollis who heads out to his summer farm and has a mistaken fight with his Russian hired man, Kasiak (an admitted communist), over the poisoning of his rabbits. And there is also the troubled marriage of Cash and Louise Bentley in “O Youth and Beauty!” wherein Cash refuses to admit his middle-age and attempts to perform athletic feats at parties, hearkening back to when he was a track star. But in the end, he is shot and killed by his wife in the end (was it deliberate, or an accident?). And we are asked to examine Ralph and Laura Whittemore’s hunt for riches in “The Pot of Gold.” And of course, we are faced with a superstitious phobia of the George Washington Bridge in “Angel of the Bridge.” And lastly the friendly relationship between Jack Lorey and Joan Harris in “Torch Song” which turns torturous as he watches Joan fall in love with a string of bad men who each meet their doom over the years until she finally comes for Jack after he falls on hard times. But when she comes for him, he vociferously rejects her, fearing she is an omen of death.
Suffice it to say there are a great many stories worth pondering in this collection, each one with an ocean of spiritual depth. Even though the stories are but a few pages long, Cheever manages to bring eminently relatable, rich, and vividly portrayed characters to life. And all of this is despite the fact that John Cheever confessed a certain degree of embarrassment at the immaturity of his early works in this collection “…even a selected display of one’s early work will be a naked history of one’s struggle to receive an education in economics and love” (vii, preface).
Notable Quotations:
“The sea that morning was iridescent and dark. My wife and my sister were swimming –Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water. I saw them come out and I saw that they were naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace, and I watched the naked women walk out of the sea” (21, closing lines from “Goodbye, My Brother”).
“She was about thirty-five years old, dissipated and gentle. She liked to think of the life she was living as an overture to something wonderful, final, and even conventional, that would begin with the next season or the season after that, but she was finding this hope more and more difficult to sustain” (68, from “The Sutton Place Story”).
“It was a fine afternoon. There were snow clouds, but a bright and cheerful light beat through them. The country, seen from the top of the hill, was black and white. Its only colors were the colors of spent fire, and this impressed itself upon one –as if desolation were something more than winter, as if it were the work of a great conflagration” (63-64 from “The Hartleys”).
“’No harm,’ he said under his breath as he swung his suitcase onto the rack –a man of forty with signs of mortality in a tremor in his right hand, signs of obsoleteness in his confused frown, a summer farmer with blistered hands, a sunburn, and lame shoulders, so visibly shaken by some recent loss of principle that it would have been noticed by a stranger across the aisle” (88, from “The Summer Farmer”).
“You could not say fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and the characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives. The were always at the threshold of fortune; they always seemed to have something on the fire” (103, from “The Pot of Gold”).
“’Well, it isn’t much of a holiday for me, Mrs. Hewing,’ he said. ‘I think Christmas is a very sad season of the year. It isn’t that people around here ain’t generous –I mean, I got plenty of tips—but, you see, I live alone in a furnished room and I don’t have any family or anything, and Christmas isn’t much of a holiday for me’” (129, from “Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor”).
“He does not understand what separates him from these children in the garden next door. He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been a young man. He has been a hero. He has been adored and happy and full of animal spirits, and now he stands in a dark kitchen, deprived of his athletic prowess, his impetuousness, his good looks –of everything that means anything to him. He feels as if the figures in the next yard are the specters from some party in that past where all his tastes and desires lie, and from which he has been cruelly removed. He feels like a ghost of the summer evening. He is sick with longing” (216, from O Youth and Beauty!”).
“It was one of those midsummer Sundays when everyone sits around saying, ‘I drank too much last night’” (603, famous opening line of “The Swimmer”).
On the 1979 Pulitzer Prize Decision
The 1979 the Pulitzer Fiction Jury consisted of the following three members (two of them returning jurors):
- Guy Davenport, Chair (1927-2005) was a multi-faceted man –a painter, author, teacher, and scholar. He was a professor of English at the University of Kentucky for some three decades and wrote voluminously, from critical essays to translations to poetry. Per his obituary in the New York Times, he was perhaps most admired for short stories in the modernist tradition of Pound and Joyce which earned him a MacArthur genius grant in 1990. Earlier in life he was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien and wrote his thesis on James Joyce. He served in the US Army in the 1950s and befriended Ezra Pound. He was married briefly in the 1960s and lived with a companion (“Bonnie Jean” Cox) until his death of lung cancer in 2005. He does not appear to have had any children. Amusingly, in one of his essays he claimed that he survived “almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.” He previously served on the 1973 and 1976 juries.
- Maurice Dolbier (1912-1993) was a former book editor of The New York Herald Tribune and The Providence Journal-Bulletin. He became literary editor of The Journal in 1951 and a book reviewer at The Tribune in 1956, but returned to The Journal in 1967 after The Tribune and its successor, The World Journal Tribune, closed. He was fondly remembered as an “intellectual with a dashing mustache” by one of his successors Alan Rosenberg at The Journal. He retired in 1985. Dolbier was also an actor and the author of children’s books. He wrote two novels, six children’s books (including The Magic Bus), and several plays. For many years, Dolbier co-hosted a “Book and Author” Luncheon with Irita Van Doren (who also previously served on several Pulitzer Fiction juries from 1961-1963). The luncheon was sponsored by The New York Herald Tribune and then the American Booksellers Association. Dolbier died in 1993 and was survived by two daughters.
- Barbara A. Bannon (1991) was the highly influential executive editor at Publishers Weekly throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. She was born in Auburn, NY and was a graduate of Manhattanville College. She joined Publishers Weekly in 1946 and became chief fiction reviewer for Forecast, the publication’s advance review section, later retiring in 1983. In 1978, she received the American Booksellers Association’s Irita Van Doren Award for her contributions to promoting books as an instrument of culture (Irita Van Doren previously served as a Pulitzer fiction juror from 1961-1963). Bannon was also served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for the general nonfiction category on four occasions. She died in 1991 at the age of 67 following complications from a fall. She was survived by a cousin.
In the Jury Report submitted by Guy Davenport, the Jury unanimously chose The Stories of John Cheever. Or as Maurice Dolbier amusingly put it, “My choice for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction is The Stories of John Cheever. Let me put it more strongly. My only choice for the Prize is The Stories of John Cheever. In style and substance, they seem to me to qualify Cheever as the finest fiction writer now working in this country (he appears, incredibly, to be incapable of putting down a wrong word), and though the stories are separate, read straight through they make up an integrated whole, giving us a multi-charactered, clear, comprehensive, and if not comforting, meaningful fictional overview in this segment of the century.”
The report further stated: “Our feeling is that Cheever’s mastery of style, his sharp and compassionate understanding of people, and his rich inventiveness with form place him well ahead of other contenders for literary excellence.”
Other novels the jury expressed admiration for included: The World According to Garp by John Irving, Continental Drift by James Houston, War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk, A Good School by Richard Yates, Final Payments by Mary Gordon, A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, Tender Mercies by Rosellen Brown, Better Times Than These by Winston Groom, The Magic Journey by John Nichols, Picture Palace by Paul Theroux, Shosha by Isaac Bashevis Singer, In The Village of the Man by Lloyd Little, and Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game by William Kennedy.
Once again, the jury expressed complaints about having too many books to review (a total of 121!), many of which should not have even been considered, such as a work of “sado-masochistic pornography from Playboy Press” which was submitted for “sheer, cynical opportunism.”
Elsewhere across the Pulitzer in 1979, Robert Penn Warren won another Pulitzer Prize, this time for the poetry category in recognition of his book Now and Then. Previously, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for All The King’s Men (feel free to read my review of the novel here) and he also previously won a Pulitzer Prize for a previous collection of poetry in 1958.
Who is John Cheever?
John William Cheever (1912-1982) was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, but spent much of his life in New York City and the Westchester County suburbs, later the setting for much of his fiction. He was the second child of Mary Liley Cheever and Frederick Lincoln Cheever, a struggling shoe salesman who fell on hard times during the Great Depression and subsequently turned to alcoholism. Cheever spent much of his youth in a large Victorian house located at 123 Winthrop Avenue in Wollaston, Massachusetts. To pay the bills, his mother opened a gift shop in Quincy which quickly failed –Cheever later called it an “abysmal humiliation.” His mother would later tell him that if not for a second Manhattan one night, he would never have been conceived (Cheever’s father apparently hoped she would seek an abortion). Cheever attended the Thayer School but struggled in its stifling atmosphere and soon transferred to Quincy High. A year later he won a short story competition and was then invited back to Thayer on a probationary status, but he quickly departed again due to poor grades (or perhaps due to a smoking incident, which Cheever liked to claim was the case afterward). At 18-years-old, Cheever penned a self-deprecating account of his experience at Thayer entitled “Expelled” (it was published in The New Republic).
In the 1930s, the family’s finances deteriorated and Cheever’s brother Fred was forced to return home from Dartmouth before the family home was foreclosed upon. Brothers John and Fred Cheever then moved into an apartment together while their parents divorced (some biographers have speculated that the Cheever brothers had an incestuous relationship during this period), and John Cheever joined the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.
Pudgy and short, Cheever was known to be a bit of a snob. He apparently liked to boast that his ancestors had come to America on the Arbella, not with the rabble on the Mayflower. When he was 22 years old, Cheever sold his first story to The New Yorker (“Buffalo” which was purchased for $45). The New Yorker would go on to publish 120 more Cheever stories. Around this time, Max Lieber became his literary agent (from 1935-1941 before he later worked with Harold Ross, Gus Lobrano, and William Maxwell at The New Yorker) and Cheever worked a failed job for the Federal Writers Project in Washington DC, and shortly thereafter he met his future wife, Mary Winternitz (daughter of Milton Winternitz, dean of Yale Medical School, and granddaughter of Thomas A. Watson, an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell during the invention of the telephone). The Cheevers met on an elevator in Manhattan when Mary was just out of Sarah Lawrence College and Mr. Cheever was scraping by as a writer. They were later married in 1941.
He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1942 and his first short story collection was published, entitled The Way Some People Live. Despite the fact that he later disowned the collection as “embarrassingly immature,” it found favor with Major Leonard Spigelgass, an MGM executive and officer in the Signal Corps. With this talent in mind, Cheever was then transferred elsewhere in the military while almost all of the rest of his company was sent off to Europe and nearly all of them were killed in Normandy on D-Day.
The Cheever’s daughter Susan was born in 1943 and their son Benjamin was born in 1948 (a third son Frederico was born in 1957). The family moved to a flat located at 400 East 59th Street, near Sutton Place, Manhattan where Cheever settled into a quirky routine in which he would dress in his only suit and take the elevator down to a maid’s room in the basement where he would then strip down to his boxer shorts and write until lunchtime. In 1946, he accepted a $4,800 advance from Random House to resume work on his novel, The Holly Tree, which had been discontinued during the war.
As he continued to publish short stories (while envying J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories), Cheever was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1951, the Cheevers moved into the suburban estate of Frank A. Vanderlip, a banker in the Westchester hamlet of Scarborough-on-Hudson, where they rented a small cottage on the edge of the estate. By coincidence the house had been previously occupied by Richard Yates, another great 20th century literary light of the suburbs. Cheever appeared on the front cover of TIME Magazine (which dubbed him “Ovid in Ossining”). By now, Cheever’s alcoholism was out of control (he called himself a “solitary drunkard”), his depression had grown severe, and his marriage was suffering. They both saw a psychiatrist, but it was clear that Cheever’s habits were the problem. He was described by the doctor as “a neurotic man, narcissistic, egocentric, friendless, and so deeply involved in [his] own defensive illusions that [he has] invented a manic-depressive wife.” Cheever canceled any further psychiatry appointments, and throughout this period he openly embarked upon numerous affairs with both men and women, including composer Ned Rorem and actress Hope Lange (she once called Cheever the most sexually active man she had ever known), all the while he was in and out of rehab. Much of this tumult later revealed with the publication of Cheever’s journals. His longest affair was with one of his students, Max Zimmer, who was brought to live in the Cheever family home for a spell. Cheever’s children later reflected upon their father’s unusual habits, bringing unknown men over to ‘help around the house,’ as well as his unorthodox marriage. Despite his bisexuality, Cheever was known to be intensely homophobic.
He contracted cancer later in life and was awarded a panoply of accolades, such as the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony, the Howells Medal for Fiction, and the National Medal for Literature (posthumously awarded six weeks after his death). In 1978, Harvard granted Cheever, who never graduated from high school, an honorary degree. He also taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop with his friend Raymond Carver.
When Cheever died on June 18, 1982, the flags in Ossining were lowered to half-staff for ten days. He is buried at First Parish Cemetery in Norwell, Massachusetts.
Throughout his literary career, Cheever carefully cultivated a public persona as an upper-crust Brahmin of sorts, in interviews he can be heard speaking with a distinct “Atlantic” accent a la Thurston Howell III. He was always a self-deprecating man. Cheever called himself “a fat slob enjoying an extraordinary run of luck” and he believed that his stories about the “deterioration of the middle-aged businessman” did not stand up against the “big, wild, rowdy” world of his friend Saul Bellow’s novels (Bellow also won a Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift in 1976, click here to read my reflections on the novel). Cheever’s Stories hit the bestseller lists as did his novel Falconer (which became a number #1 bestseller), and The Wapshot Chronicle, his other great novel, made it onto the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language novels of the 20th century. In total, Cheever published seven collections of short stories and five novels. After his death, Cheever’s wife Mary unfortunately became entangled in a lengthy legal battle over his unpublished material.
His children, Ben and Susan, became writers. Susan has even published books about her own alcoholism and sex addiction (including Drinking in America: Our Secret History and Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction). And the two have served as stewards of their father’s legacy, tending his copyrights and reprints and ensuring there were enough royalties to care for their mother who passed away in 2014. The youngest child, Federico (or “Fred”), was a law professor at the University of Denver before his untimely death, likely due to a surprise heart attack while on a kayaking trip with his family.
Somewhat notoriously, years after his death, Cheever’s name appeared in an episode of the television show Seinfeld in which Kramer accidentally burns down a cabin and inadvertently reveals that the father of George Costanza’s girlfriend had a homosexual affair with Cheever (a box of letters is the only surviving object from the fire). Also, Cheever was partly the inspiration for the character Don Draper in Mad Men, who lives in Ossining, drinks excessively, and engages in numerous affairs.
For further references on John Cheever, I recommend reading Martin Chilton’s survey of Cheever and his work in a 2015 article in The Telegraph entitled “John Cheever: ‘the Chekhov of the suburbs,’” a 2009 article in The New York Times Magazine by Charles McGrath entitled “The First Suburbanite,” and lastly I would also recommend his famous Paris Review interview conducted in 1969 shortly after the publication of his novel Bullet Park. One notable quotation (among many) that I gleaned from this interview is the following: “There are no stubborn truths. As for lying, it seems to me that falsehood is a critical element in fiction. Part of the thrill of being told a story is the chance of being hoodwinked or taken. Nabokov is a master at this. The telling of lies is a sort of sleight of hand that displays our deepest feelings about life.”
Film Adaptations:
- The Swimmer (1968)
- Director: Frank Perry
- Starring: Burt Lancaster
- Note: Cheever was a frequent visitor to the set and makes a cameo in the film.
Further Reading:
- The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) by John Cheever
- Falconer (1977), a novel by John Cheever
- John Cheever: A Biography (1988) by Scott Donaldson
- Cheever: A Life (2009), a biography by Blake Bailey (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize).
Literary Context 1978-1979:
- Nobel Prize for Literature (1978): Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Polish-born American Jewish writer, “for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.”
- National Book Award Winner (1979): Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien.
- Booker Prize Winner (1978): The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch.
- Per Publishers Weekly, the bestselling novel in 1978 was Chesapeake by James A. Michener (who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). Other notable bestsellers included War and Remembrance by Herman Wouk (who previously won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction), Fools Die by Mario Puzo, The Holocroft Covenant by Robert Ludlum, and Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett.
- Douglas Adams’ comic science fiction series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy first began as a radio comedy drama.
- Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr. was published.
- What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson was published.
- The Stand by Stephen King was published.
- Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster was published (one of the first novels in the Star Wars Expanded Universe).
- Running Dog by Don DeLillo was published.
- The World According to Garp by John Irving was published.
- The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin was published.
- The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan was published.
- The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven was published.
- The Coup by John Updike was published.
- Kalki by Gore Vidal was published.
- A Good School by Richard Yates was published.
- The Wrestling Game by Ellen Raskin was published.
Did The Right Book Win?
Even if the Pulitzer Prize has occasionally missed the mark when it comes to selecting the best novel for the year, the same cannot be said of its short story winners, particularly Katherine Anne Porter, James Alan McPherson, and now John Cheever. Every one of John Cheever’s sixty-one stories in this collection stands alone as a uniquely polished masterpiece –many of these stories are haunting, unsettling, striking, and Cheever’s prose remains emblazoned in the back of my mind while his indelible characters continue linger long after reading about their troubled lives. The Stories of John Cheever remains an outstanding selection by the Pulitzer; the only other potential nominee that even comes to mind that same year could be The World According to Garp by John Irving, but I still continue to celebrate John Cheever’s achievement.
Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, New York, NY, 2000 (stories published between 1947-1982).